NEW YORK.- On November 14th, 2008, Audio Visual Arts (AVA), a location of artistic activity, will open at 34 East 1st Street in New York City. AVA will engage emerging artists near and far. A program has been established that will feature solo exhibitions in the Front Room of the space as well as an ongoing series of Exterior Sounds that will be transmitted through a permanent speaker box on the facade of the building. Future projects (i.e. experimental theatre, music, dinners, film screenings, lectures, happenings, recordings, whittlings) will take place in the Office, the Garden, and the Basement of the space in addition to the Vacant Lot across the street.
AVA will hold it’s inaugural Front Room exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist John Andrew, entitled A Room (Dilated), including sculpture and vinyl lettering. Andrew’s work functions as a vehicle for attuning, or retuning, individual patterns of attention and perception. The works activate perceptual complexity; they create a horizon, in a phenomenological sense, and the perceiver is left to process the information and stretch the mind.
At the center of the exhibition is a kinetic sculpture called “Domestic Drone”. The object consists of a harmonica from the 1940’s mounted onto a small German fan from the early 1980’s. When plugged in, a subtle single note drone can be heard. The constant shift in electricity and air, mingled with the purr of the fan causes an audible waver that is trance inducing. Andrew sees this transcendent state as an opportunity to celebrate powers of the human imagination. La Monte Young said the following when speaking of his introduction to sustained tones: “I really felt that it was the most incredible revelation I’d had in music. It became the key to my understanding of the relationship between sound and feeling, and to my theories about universal structure, and our perception of universal structure, and our perception of time...” –As related to David Doty in 1/1: The Journal of the Just Intonation Network [Autumn, 1989].
“Domestic Drone” was recorded to tape and an edition of 100, double sided locked groove copies of the recording have been pressed to 7” white vinyl. The record, along with a blind embossed insert, will be sold during the exhibition.
John Andrew has exhibited work at The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik, Iceland), TAKT Kunstprojektraum (Berlin), Fold Gallery (London), and Phillips De Pury (New York). This is his first solo show in New York. A forthcoming show at AVA will take place in the fall of 2009.
